U.S. gets closer to Iran, wins pledge to aid GIs in distress

Elaine Sciolino and Neil A. LewisNew York Times News Service

In an important sign of growing cooperation with the United States in its war against Afghanistan, Iran has sent a secret message to the Bush administration agreeing to rescue any U.S. military personnel in distress in its territory, U.S. and Iranian officials said Monday.

The Iranian message was sent Oct. 8, hours after U.S. and allied forces launched their first military strikes against Afghan targets, the officials said.

It was a response to a confidential message the previous day from the Bush administration that assured Iran that the United States would respect Iran's territorial integrity, including its airspace.

The Bush administration also requested that Iran come to the aid of any American who might be shot down or forced to land in Iranian territory or who escaped into Iran, the officials said.

Both messages were delivered through the Swiss government, which represents U.S.-Iranian interests in the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The Iranian and U.S. messages are the latest and most important of several to pass between the two countries through the Swiss channel in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States and could have political ramifications extending far beyond the fate of U.S. military personnel.

In recent weeks, Iran and the United States have engaged in what one senior administration official called a ballet in which both sides are taking tentative steps to explore where their national security interests intersect, in this crisis and beyond.

Weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks on America, the Bush administration opened an interagency review of U.S. policy toward Iran. The State Department, with its policy-planning director, Richard Haass, taking the lead, has tried to accelerate the review since the attacks, administration officials said.

Among the issues under discussion are how much Iran needs to build its conventional defensive military strength and whether U.S. economic sanctions against Iran should be sustained, administration officials said.

A consensus is growing in the administration that the Clinton administration policy of "dual containment," which isolated and punished Iran and Iraq, was unwise and that the United States could no longer have both countries as enemies.

"How did it happen that we are on the opposite side of both Iran and Iraq?" Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked a journalist at a dinner three days before the attacks. "It makes no sense."

In a related diplomatic development, U.S. and Iranian officials met face-to-face Oct. 7 at an obscure UN-sponsored forum in Geneva for the second time since the Sept. 11 attacks to discuss the shape of a future government in Afghanistan, U.S. and Iranian officials said. They added that the talks had focused on ways to broaden the base of a future government.

The United States, through the World Food Program of the United Nations, is shipping food aid overland from Iran to Afghanistan. A first consignment of 110 tons of wheat was delivered to Herat, Afghanistan, without difficulty on Wednesday.

Iran's offer to help U.S. military personnel is a signal that Iran does not intend to use the U.S.-led military campaign against terrorism as a pretext to target U.S. interests in the region, officials from both countries said.

In the war in Afghanistan, the United States needs at least the tacit support of Iran, which shares a 560-mile border with Afghanistan and supplies weapons and logistical and financial support to the anti-Taliban forces known as the Northern Alliance.

Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned the military strikes on Afghanistan last week and accused Washington of lying about its true intentions. Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, has called for an immediate end to the military strikes, saying they were causing a "human catastrophe."